Blog & New Postings

Month October 2014

Dr. Tom Horvath recently posted a blog on the “dual citizenship phenomenon”–individuals who concurrently participate in SMART Recovery and AA or other 12-step meetings. We share Dr. Horvath’s interest in this phenomenon of people simultaneously involved in secular, spiritual and religious recovery support groups–groups whose core ideas and practices would on the surface seem to(……)

This week’s blogs is the third of a continuing meditation on stigma, recovery concealment/disclosure, and its personal and social effects. Here are some random thoughts we would like to share for your reflection. Social Effects of Concealment Recovery concealment (“passing”) offers some level of protection to the individual, but buttresses the social conditions (e.g., public(……)

To Reveal, or to Conceal, that is the Question– Whether ’tis Nobler in the mind to suffer The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune, Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles, And by opposing, end them? -Shakespeare, Revised Hamlet soliloquy To display or not to display, to tell or not to tell; to(……)

Addiction counseling has rich historical roots–spanning early Native American recovery advocacy leaders, 19th century temperance missionaries, reformed men working within early inebriate homes and asylums, lay alcoholism therapists, the “paraprofessional” counsels of the mid-twentieth century–all contributing to the birth and evolution of modern addiction counseling as a specialized profession. It was the dream of Mel(……)

Debates continue on whether the stigma attached to persons experiencing alcohol and other drug (AOD)-related problems has a positive or negative social effect on the nature and magnitude of these problems. Stigma promoters argue that public castigation of excessive AOD users prevents such use at a cultural level and exerts pressure for AOD deceleration/cessation among(……)

Addiction shrinks one’s world to a state of stark self-imprisonment. As the person-drug relationship devours everything else of value, nothing remains that cannot and will not be sacrificed. And as the drug then devours the self, what remains are only manipulative masks interchanged so quickly that any sense of “true self” remains as only a(……)